


Take the Rabbit Out of the Hat

by CampionSayn



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Loki stays in the dungeons, Thor's version of an apology, not TDW compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-06
Updated: 2014-05-06
Packaged: 2018-01-23 17:41:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1574117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CampionSayn/pseuds/CampionSayn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a reason aside from the “being a true Asgardian Warrior” thing as to why Thor never learned magic. It’s because he sucks at it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take the Rabbit Out of the Hat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Twilight_Shadow_Songs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Twilight_Shadow_Songs/gifts).



_-:-_  
_If you can’t do something smart, do something right._  
_-Joss Whedon._

* * *

  
_Broken leaves on the foot of the stairs outside of the Asgard palace garden._

Stuck in the dungeons leaves little for Loki to do aside from reading and talking to Thor and looking somewhat forward to the rewards Thor had insisted Odin give the trickster for his help after the Allmother had been killed in seeking revenge as well as help for Thor’s maiden.

And also, he was left to reminisce each time it became clearer and clearer by the booming explosions above ground that signified the fail use of magic, of old days.

_Very careful whispers in an attempt to utter words unfamiliar on the tongue._

Frigga had taught Loki magic and defensive combat. Odin had taught Thor to be a warrior; that much was easy to remember. But Loki would not even be bothered to remember such things if not for the occasional bursts of cleverness mixed with bittersweet Thor blurted from his stupid mouth now and then—such as the week before.

_(The room was warmer with Thor around, sitting in one of the chairs he’d dragged in from one of the palace rooms without Odin noticing and a lot of passersby gawking at him the whole way. The Thunderer had been the one to request to bring in Loki’s food that day and while the green clothing rustled on his brother’s skin with each motion of picking something up and nibbling at it—perchance, just to annoy the other—Thor ate the red apple he had brought home from Midgard which he explained had been hard to get at the top of one of Stark’s garden trees than it would otherwise been had he been in uniform and not trying to amuse the Foster woman each time he hit a branch on the way down. It made him think of milk teeth and easily bruised knees and Loki when he had once done something similar with a fig in the royal garden with Thor catching him before he hit the ground; magic stopping the both of them from crashing backwards in harm._

_“When we were still in youth, do you remember how I always tried to bring you along with myself and the other warriors so that we might have made you less of a target for ridicule?”_

_“Aye, and I recall as well doing such similar things with you in trying to get you to at least ATTEMPT to learn some sorcery. If only so I needn’t have always been required to be there to save your hide from stupidity.”_

_Thor roved the apple in his hand, red not so unlike his cape—he hadn’t worn the thing that day; in the dungeons, he preferred not to make a spectacle of himself, unlike above ground, Loki thought snide and frowning into his soup bowl—and brilliant against his tanned flesh._

_He did not bite it, so his voice was clear at his answer to Loki, “To this day, I wish I had learned.”)_

The pounding between blood vessels as the body fills with adrenaline the blooms to the surface of consciousness; the feel of it not unlike the paper, waxy and clean for meat fresh cut up and still bleeding in an animal’s last signs of ever having been.

Loki had woken up to a crease in the air rattling the walls all around, sending him from slumber and to the floor of his cell, cold floor meaning nothing against his flesh—unlike the other prisoners who burned like convulsing stars and fading suns in their own skin; true Aesir, unlike Loki—and the other prisoners of the cells grumbling to life on their floors as well; the noise of them bringing into Loki’s mind the thought of a painter and his painting on Midgard that became old and deaf, the painter imagined giant he’d created in misery hanging in some art gallery in New York. The giant stood with his back to fleeing villagers, arms raised and fists closed for combat, but he was not chasing the people…

“Oh, by the Tree…” the dark haired man hissed, pushing hair from his face and clawing at his bedding to get back to his former sleeping position as yet another gallumping noise thudded the halls above and he also caught sounds of shrieks that shared ire and fear and then… there was a hissing and Loki perked up straighter, ears tweaked to hear more before all went quiet and nothing was happening.

‘Damn,’ Loki thought, sitting in the little dimple he’d made in his bed, not warm, but giving off cool vibes from his sleep in one position, ‘Now I’m awake and curious. What did Thor do this time?’

* * *

  
Thor manages to try his hand at magic much like he’d tried his hand at other things in his youth, only to find he did not have either the ability to pay much attention to it, or simply did not have the talent for it. Magic required a sort of prevaricating nature that Odin had hashed out of him when training with short-handled hammers, swords quite heavy when Thor was just a whelp with barely enough muscle to matter in the least and calls that sent thunder through the air to frighten his enemies before going after them in foolhardy bloodlust.

Was that the reason he had rejected Loki asking his brother to come to his lessons with Frigga when they were younger; because he was stupid as—what was the phrase Jane had used once when he’d gone shopping with her in the Pottery Barn… oh, right—a bull in a china shop? Too unrefined and too brutish to care about subtle things that would be swifter to bring peace and quiet than yelling loudest and being able to best someone on strength alone?

Walking down to the dungeons with Loki’s breakfast in hand, Thor tried not to look as put out as he actually was about his newest botched attempt at learning sorcery that had totaled one of the study rooms of the palace and had the other prisoners before Loki, all the brutes and rioters and greedy bastards at the front of the dungeons, looking at him as though Thor was that morning the wolf among sheep.

Some of the vile men actually jeered and made attempts to prompt him into opening their cells so that they might do battle with the person wandering the halls that could not possibly be the crown prince, but rather a trespasser of the realm that even traitors to the crown had right to do battle with, but Thor just rolled his eyes, keeping his hands from clenching and breaking the plate holding fruit and meats, and tried to ignore the smell coming off of him that had tagged along from the rooms above that were still being cleaned by the palace staff.

The guards had been informed of his current predicament, thankfully, so he just nodded _(ah, there was that look in their eyes as well, derision and hints of what his shield brothers Steve and Tony had informed him were considered racism or xenophobia or some other mortal term that meant ‘hatred of someone not like themselves;’ but was less obvious than it had been with the others)_ when he passed by them and knocked on the barrier of Loki’s cell.

The feeling of the other surprise he had for his brother gave him strength as Loki turned from the mirror he was looking upon to attempt to fix up his hair into a little less unruly state for the day and actually dropped his hair brush when he made eye contact with red where there should have been blue.

He tried not to take offense when Loki’s jaw dropped and then closed and then he looked like he was trying not to choke on laughter while being very much unamused all at the same time. Tony Stark would have made a rude insinuation about the look Loki settled on _(eyes bright and curious, lips thinned for disappointment and jaw set so he wouldn’t say something he didn’t intend to)_ but Thor just held the food aloft and sent it through a rift in the sealing magic of the cell that everyone that wasn’t a prisoner could use; the food set on the side table that also held Loki’s books from Midgard Thor had brought him that the thunderer thought would be amusing to his brother—The Phantom of the Opera, Rose and the Beast: Fairy Tales Retold, The Zombie Survival Guide, Winnie-the-Pooh _(original in the series it came in, according to Jane)_ and Fragile Things for a bit of clever poetry—with a half-hearted smile that didn’t quite feel real when his face was a little numb.

“Breakfast, brother! And today it comes with the thick slices of bacon so you won’t get too hungry before lunch roles by—“

“By Hel, you oaf, what did you do to yourself?!”

Fingers twined together in front of Thor as he considered the best way to answer when his brother got off of his seat and marched over to the barrier until Thor could almost feel his brother’s nose touch the magic force, that look still in place as green eyes (no, Loki didn’t have green eyes and if Thor was going to get him to accept this situation, Thor was going to have to get used to thinking such as well) narrowed even further, spotting little bits of what remained of Thor’s usually peach or bronzed skin against the milk-marble blue that was mottling the thunderer in result of the spell from earlier that sent everyone awake.

Perhaps Thor should not have tried to get past being any more than a hand magician just yet. What Loki considered to be parlor tricks were difficult enough, Thor always lighting the ceiling on fire when just trying to blink awake a thick candle on a table he was practicing on or, worse; objects he was focusing on too intently turned into the equal, but opposite of what he had intended—small rocks turning into melted gold tinged with river silt; blocks of wood sprouting sprigs and branches that kinked towards the end before they bent to the ground and scuttled out into the hallways, in which some of the staff shrieked and made to go after it with a broom until Thor pretty-much-mostly got it to drop off into stillness (or explode).

Nothing he could do about it now, though. If he could have changed back before standing before Loki he would have. And now the younger man was tracing the lines of what might have been scar-tattooing on any other species but the one Thor looked like—not nearly as clean or tagged as they would have been if Thor was born into a specific family—and then squinting at the scabbing Thor knew was forming along the two horns that had burst out of his head after he’d turned blue.

But rather than commenting on the much more obviousness of Thor looking like a Frost Giant _(not as small as Loki was in comparison to the real things, but still a good four feet below average)_ like Thor thought he would, the liesmith crinkled his nose and sniffed obviously at his food and then deeper when he noted that the smell was not coming from the food, but the sweat Thor had left on the tray.

Looking from the food and then again at Thor, Loki inhaled one more time before finally asking, “I take it your magic studies are going as abysmally as everyone says they’ve been; but why do you smell like burning oranges?”

Thor coughed and rubbed at the horn on the right side of his head that was a bit longer than the one on the left side, sheepish even beyond the red eyes that made Loki want to smack him—they were blue eyes, they were, they were, they were; why did the blonde have to be so stupid?!

“…I-I, uh, don’t know, brother. I was reading one of your old books on Jotunheim and trying to work on one of the easy spells about illusion and there was a mirror and one of the servants walked in and I was in the middle of saying the words and making the illusion and the servant was dusting the mirror and I-I think I must have said it wrong and… I looked away when the servant caused the mirror to fall and the next thing I knew my hand was pointing at the mirror and, well.”

He motioned over his torso and then up and down as he’d seen Tony do on occasion when he was running late for a date with Pepper, looking for confirmation that the wardrobe he’d transitioned into after sitting before one of his suits for hours on nothing but coffee and ideas swimming in his head; the gist was obvious and Loki snorted, bringing a hand to the bridge of his nose and rubbing between his eyes.

“Were you trying to make me breakfast with magic? Because if this is your end result,” he pointed down to the food, finger waving around the meat like a flighty gnat and the rest of him suspicious, “I am not putting one thing into my mouth. For all we know it’s all poison and festering mold internally right this moment.”

Thor shook his head, understanding and not at all insulted, “No, no. I know better than that after recalling when you were first starting out your magic and gave me that peach you turned from an apple.”

Loki cringed minutely at the mention of the incident.

_(Six years old, learning basics from his mother in the art of changing one thing into another through forces that, at the time, were beyond his and Thor’s comprehension, and he’d thought that he’d done absolutely perfectly at the spell his mother had given him for the afternoon. Turning one food into another had seemed simple, but turned out to take hours to finish before the last vestiges of the green apple skin turned into the light rose pink of a peach; his fingers had been careful and tingled when he touched fuzz where there had been sleekness of juicy skin._

_Rather than taking it to mother, as she had told him to, when he was finished, he looked for Thor at the training grounds. The blonde had been under a great tree to hide in the shade as he had been humiliated by Odin when they were sparring with wooden swords and the horses—Thor having been kicked off a stallion and unable to even attempt landing a hit on Odin before his father had brought his own sword down and left marks that would bruise within the next twelve hours._

_“Brother! I have a gift for you!”)_

While considering on his failures in childhood, Loki didn’t notice Thor remove something from his pocket and hold it up like a gardener who has found a fallen chick just below its nest (naked, trembling, Thor recalled finding a robin of the sort once and had Loki stand on his shoulders to set it back in its nest before casting a spell so it would never fall out without the ability to flap its wing and ascend to the air ever again) and hold his present up to the light.

It was a sort of mottled sphere made of greatly bound roots with bobbing seedlings and grown flora peeking up and searching for light (though, two of the plants seemed as if they turned towards Loki and didn’t mind the cold he seemed to radiate to keep his cell comfortable) as their colors mingled; purple as royalty among the Midgardians hundreds of years prior and yellow with red weaving that seemed to be like honey bees.

Some dirt from within the sphere of green dropped to the floor and Loki almost approved of this simple attempt and production of hand magic that wasn’t quite high on the difficulty level but was seen as a sort of triumph in middle-level magic learning.

Violets and Bee Orchids. Honesty and deception bound together in meaning and in life and in the palms of Thor’s hands as gift to his little brother.

It was worth so very little to most people, but Loki understood and allowed himself to be grateful for something to decorate his cell that wasn’t dead.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not even going to lie, this might not seem very good, but I had a reason to write and I took it. I haven't even watched both movies all the way through, so if these two seem out of character from how they are in the movies, blame the fact I only really know about them through comics.


End file.
